


with a can full of gas and a handful of matches

by limned



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Smut, Therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-04-26 16:10:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14405736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limned/pseuds/limned
Summary: For the first couple of months, it isn’t a problem.  Scott’s so exhausted from getting back into competition shape that he usually falls directly into bed after supper and doesn’t think about sex at all.





	1. Chapter 1

For the first couple of months, it isn’t a problem. Scott’s so exhausted from getting back into competition shape that he usually falls directly into bed after supper and doesn’t think about sex at all.

He doesn’t even need to deal with morning wood. His body seems to have switched that off to conserve energy like he’s recovering from an injury—which he basically is, a million tiny injuries from the stretching and weights and cardio, relentless reminders that competition fitness is a different animal from touring fitness and he should have kicked up his preparation a lot sooner.

So he doesn’t have the energy to think about sex, much less to pop instant erections in the middle of choreography like he’s fourteen again.

Until he suddenly does, on a random Tuesday afternoon in July, and it’s so embarrassing that he wants to sink into the floor.

“Sorry,” he mutters, his face burning, because he set her down lightning-fast but there’s no way in hell she didn’t feel it, not with how he was pressed against her thigh at the end of the lift.

Tessa doesn’t look embarrassed but she does look surprised, eyebrows shooting toward her hairline. He can’t blame her, because this hasn’t happened since they were teenagers.

Scott can tell from the tilt of her head that she’s ready to make a joke out of it. He jerks his eyes away and feels his mouth press into a flat line, and when he glances up again Tessa’s expression has smoothed out: message received. She knows better than anyone that he’ll clown all day long but he hates being laughed _at_ , and this is too weird and unexpected for him to find it funny right now.

“Problem?” Sam asks, curious.

“No, we’re fine,” Tessa says, her eyes still on him. He keeps his back carefully turned to Sam—who thank fucking god wasn’t filming just now—and Tess, amazingly thoughtful and brilliant Tess, moves around him and draws Sam into conversation at an angle that lets him safely head for the water on the side table.

He gulps down half a bottle and surreptitiously adjusts himself inside his briefs, but _fuck_ he’s so hard, this isn’t going away soon, and he feels almost lightheaded with how fast it happened. “Need a break, guys. Back in a few,” he calls across the room, aiming for nonchalance, though he's pretty sure it misses by a wide margin.

Tessa finds him outside on the fire escape stairs. He’s been sitting there for almost fifteen minutes, deep-breathing with his face propped in his hands.

“Hey,” she says, and nudges his shoulder gently with her knee. “You alright?”

“Yeah, getting there,” he says through his fingers. “Jesus, T, I’m sorry. That was not cool.”

“It’s okay,” she says. She sounds so relaxed that he feels the tension in his shoulders ease a little. “Scott, come on, it’s fine. It happens.”

“Not recently,” he says dryly.

Tessa laughs, but quiet, like she wants to make it very clear that she still isn’t laughing _at_ him, that she understands how off-balance he feels. “True,” she acknowledges. “Well, it’s proof that you’re still young?”

Scott huffs and scrubs his hands over his eyes. “Yeah, right. I can do without that kind of proof, and so can you.” He finally drops his hands and looks up at her, trying to give her a real smile. “Thanks for running interference with Sam.”

She smiles back, easy, comfortable. “No problem. We were almost done, anyway. Let’s call it a day.”

He feels guilty about agreeing because it seems like the coward’s way out, no matter that she doesn’t look bothered. They aren’t in the habit of calling practice early. But his body is still bizarrely tuned up and he’s not sure he could handle a replay of what just happened, so he lets out a slow breath and nods. “Okay. Tomorrow’s a better day,” he says, and takes her hand easily when she offers it.

*

It’s not. It doesn’t get better; it gets worse. The rest of the week is a waking nightmare.

“I’m sorry,” he says, over and over again, like a broken record. His face feels permanently red, like his body shouldn’t have any blood left to send to his dick.

On Thursday she asks, “Did you try to—” and pauses, and he says, ” _Yes,_ ” between gritted teeth, because he’s not an idiot, so _of course_ he tried jerking off right before he left his apartment, but it only delays the inevitable until later in the morning.

He has to take another break right then, practically running away from her. He can’t believe Tessa had to ask him that, can’t believe he’s put her in this position.

It feels a hundred times worse than when he was fourteen, because back then he had adults calmly explaining how this happened to everyone and it wasn’t his fault, and the other guys in the locker room joked about the subject enough that he knew it _did_ happen to everyone, it really wasn’t his fault, and now he has none of that because he’s 28 and a seasoned professional and he shouldn’t be reacting this way. He feels like the world’s biggest pervert every time he has to hastily lower Tess from a lift or a spin and move away from her, skating wide circles around the rink in a useless effort to calm down.

Sam is spending their studio time very delicately pretending that he hasn’t noticed what’s happening right in front of him. Scott imagines that he might be used to dealing with this from teenage clients but has absolutely no idea what to say to grown-ass adults who have been dancing together for eighteen years.

Marie-France and Patch are less good at pretending to be oblivious, but at least they haven’t said anything to him yet. Scott hasn’t been able to look either of them straight in the face since Wednesday.

Tessa hasn’t made him talk about it either. Aside from the blinding humiliation of, “Did you try to—” she’s only said _it’s okay_ and _don’t worry_ and _just take a break._ She’s obviously attempting to give him enough time to fix his pathetic problem on his own.

*

Friday is another level, an unmitigated disaster. He brought himself off twice the previous night and again in the morning and it doesn’t matter, at all. He gets so desperate that he actually goes into the washroom during his third break, barely a dozen strokes before he’s coming over his knuckles and biting his lip to stay quiet, panting, trying to force himself not to think about her.

Then it’s a disaster in a whole new way, because he is achingly aware that Tessa knows what he did, especially when her eyes drop to the puffiness in his lower lip, and the shame makes him completely unable to focus for the rest of their ice time. He’s such a mess that they look like they’re skating two different routines.

The only lucky part is that none of the other senior teams are scheduled for the same practice sessions this week, so he isn’t putting his incompetence and horrific lack of self-control on full display to the entire Gadbois group. That might have been enough to make him seriously consider quitting ice dance and moving west to work the oil fields before the weekend.

*

They both got the talks from coaches and parents when they were young, about appropriate versus inappropriate touching and what to do if they felt that lines were being crossed. They compared notes when they were a little older and could discuss it without going nonfunctional from embarrassment, so he learned that he'd received a slightly different version than Tessa did. The same general content but with a stronger emphasis on behaving himself when his hormones were raging out of control.

And then there was Danny’s much more direct version: _If you ever use skating to touch Tessa in a way that you’re not supposed to, I’ll beat the living shit out of you._

Scott knows this isn’t the same thing—he isn’t doing it on purpose, he’d do almost anything to make it _stop_ —but he still feels like somebody ought to show up and beat the shit out of him. It might make him feel a little better.

*

Saturday is manageable only because they stick to the no-touch step sequences in the short. That’s humiliating in its own special way, a silent announcement from their coaches that Scott isn’t good for anything else right now, that they’re tailoring practice to accommodate the fact that he can’t hold his partner and control his libido at the same time.

Even the pared-down practice isn’t very good. He tries as hard as he can, fighting to block out the frustration and confusion of the last four days and just concentrate on the work, but it’s only decent. It isn’t terrible but they aren’t making forward progress.

When he comes out of the recovery room and sees Tessa talking to Marie-France at the other end of the rink, heads bent together seriously, he knows that his grace period is up.

He’s briefly tempted to bolt out of the building before either of them spot him, or before Patch corners him for their own serious talk, which could very well be in the cards.

He doesn’t, but it’s really fucking tempting.

Instead he walks along the boards. Slowly, squeezing his car keys anxiously in his hand, wishing he were anywhere else, but he does it. He forces himself to keep walking until Marie-France notices his approach from the corner of her eye and glances over, and then he stops a polite out-of-earshot distance away and waits until they’re finished.

It’s only a couple of minutes. “Scott, see you on Monday,” Marie-France calls as she turns away, and he waves distractedly because he’s already focused on Tessa, moving toward him.

This is the better scenario. He’d been a little afraid that all three of them might drag him into a conference room or something, but he still feels sick with nerves. He can’t run away now. He can only stand and wait, watching her approach and trying to read the expression on her face, and he knows he’s done harder things but right now it really doesn’t feel that way.


	2. Chapter 2

He doesn’t succeed in keeping his eyes on her. By the time she reaches him, Scott is staring down at her feet and gripping his keys so hard that they dig painfully into his hand. His face feels hot already.

Tessa's voice sounds warmer than it has any right to. “Oh god, Scott, you don’t have to look like you’re headed to your execution.”

He tries to shrug but his shoulders are so tight that the motion is awkward, and he still can’t look at her. “Yeah, well. Really not looking forward to this.”

“I know.”

For a second he isn’t sure what she’s doing when she wraps her hand around his wrist, but then she pries his fingers open and takes his keys away, head bent over his hand as she studies the red imprints left by the metal edges. Her thumb rubs gently over the deepest mark in his palm.

He _hates_ this, so much. Even that innocuous little touch is making his body light up, and if he doesn’t pull away soon she’ll be able to tell.

But Tessa drops his hand quickly. “Come on. I still need to do some stretching. You can do something else.”

*

He isn’t the slightest bit surprised that she had a designated plan for _something else_. She always has a plan.

“Right,” Tessa says briskly, tightening the strap on his second glove. “Three minutes. Then you can stay on the bag, but we have to talk, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, already bouncing on his toes, half-smiling in a way that is more real than anything he’s managed since Tuesday. If he could, he’d yank her off her feet in a hug of gratitude, because this is exactly what he needs. Instead he delivers the lightest tap to her chin. “Thanks, T.”

“Go ahead,” she says, smiling, and turns to hit the interval timer.

He pounds his gloves together twice and attacks the heavy bag immediately.

It feels so good to slam away, the satisfying smack of leather and the impact shock from his fists up through his shoulders. Scott knows he isn’t the only skater who uses the boxing equipment for stress relief as well as cardio/reflex training—he’s seen Kaetlyn visit some truly epic violence on a few speed balls after bad competitions—but he uses it more than most, with his temper. Sometimes there just isn’t a substitute for hitting something as hard as you fucking can.

It used to drive him nuts when coaches and physios worried that he would hurt himself on the heavy bag, like he was dumb enough to forget that he needed his hands and arms to keep his partner safe.

For the first minute he’s aware of Tessa stretching nearby on the mats, but then his concentration narrows down to the swinging bag. He doesn’t get fancy, just straight rights and straight lefts in flurries of four, throwing them hard and steady, pouring all of his frustration into each hit. If he can’t do anything else right, he can do this, exhaust his anger on the bag and keep his hands aimed properly.

The timer beeps long before he’s ready. He winds down slowly, throwing punch after punch to delay what happens next, but he can’t delay forever.

When he finally looks over, Tessa is sitting crosslegged on the edge of the mats, watching him. “Do you want to start?” she asks evenly.

He doesn’t. He’d like to throw himself out a window, maybe, but it would be hard to compete after that. “No,” he says instead.

“Okay. I will.” She settles back on the mat, hands braced behind her, looking up at him. “I’m sorry we have to talk about this. I wouldn’t if we didn’t have to, but we need to fix this. It’s happening because you aren’t having sex?”

 _Jesus._ She isn’t wasting any time, and he squeezes his eyes shut. This can’t be real. There shouldn’t be any universe where his skating partner has to ask him that question.

“Sack up, Moir. You could be having this conversation with Marie instead of me.”

Scott’s eyes fly open—did she really just tell him to _sack up_ like one of his hockey buddies?—and he stares at her incredulously, and Tessa doesn’t even twitch, just stares back with one eyebrow raised and the same determined expression as when they’re having a disagreement about choreography. No way out. Fuck.

“Yes,” he says reluctantly, after a very long pause. “Yeah, it is. It’s been—a while.”

Tessa’s eyes are so sharp on his face, like she’s seeing everything. He looks away and drives another two jabs at the heavy bag.

“Do you have anyone in mind? Dating, I mean?”

“No.” He hits the bag again, hard, and sets it swinging so he can step left and throw two more. “I can’t, Tess. We talked about that, about distractions, and it’s no good. I can’t start seeing someone while we’re coming back to competition.”

They hadn’t actually stated it outright as _no relationships for either of us until after the Olympics_. But they’d both understood what their agreement meant, endlessly talking about _one hundred percent in_ , _keep our focus on us_ , and everything else. And he knows himself, he’s terrible at casual, so it would be unfair to both a potential girlfriend and to their comeback, and most likely screw up both.

When he glances over at her, Tessa nods like she was expecting that answer. “I didn’t think so. I had to ask, though. It would be an option.”

The tone of her voice is helping him to cope a little, to get past the incredible weirdness of discussing subjects they’ve always handled with indirect references or complete avoidance. She sounds like she’s moving down a problem-solving checklist, familiar as anything in training. Maybe he can dissociate from the awkwardness by pretending they’re talking about a step sequence or the goddamn ISU judging politics.

That hope is blown out of the water when she says, “What about one-night stands?”

“ _Tessa_ ,” he says despairingly, staring over her left shoulder. This is the worst conversation he’s ever had.

“It’s an option,” she says with the same calm determination, and then it sounds like she’s picking her words very carefully. “I know you’ve never had any trouble finding company.”

He blinks at her for a second. “Um, thanks? That might be the classiest way anyone has ever called me a slut.”

Tessa smothers a laugh and gives him a pointed look, her head cocked. “I wasn’t calling you a _slut_. You know what I mean. People talk, Scott, and I’m not completely clueless.”

He represses a sigh. He does know what she means, because he’s had his share of fun between relationships, but it’s so strange to hear her acknowledge that out loud.

“So? Option?” she prods.

“I _tried_ ,” he says tightly. “I went to a bar on Peel last night, but one of her friends recognized me and people were asking for pictures. Then it was getting late and I couldn’t—it wasn’t going to work, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t drink and she was, so it just felt creepy. Like I was picking out a target and sitting there with my club soda until she got drunk enough. It was awful.”

“That’s because you’re not an asshole,” Tessa says, clear and calm, like he isn’t an asshole for causing this whole conversation in the first place. “Okay. So random bar hookups aren’t a solution.”

“No,” he mutters. His face feels hot again; he’s probably red down to his collar. “I’d never have enough time to do that on the regular anyway. Not with our schedule.”

“Is there someone you could make an arrangement with?”

Scott shifts his feet restlessly and hits the heavy bag again, half-turned away from her because _dammit_ , he doesn’t want to discuss this angle in particular, and of course she wouldn’t avoid it, not in problem-solving mode.

He’s known this about her for years now: when she isn’t in a relationship, Tessa handles sex with ruthless practicality.

He hadn’t wanted to learn it. He actively tried to avoid knowing too much about that part of her life, but some things were inescapable when you spent enough time living in each other’s back pockets during training and competitions and tours. Before Sochi he’d realized that she had… _arrangements_ with a small and carefully selected handful of guys, guys who appeared very briefly when she was in their city and disappeared just as fast, with no signs of contact in between. It stopped when she was dating someone and restarted when she wasn’t, quick and discreet and she never talked about it.

Much as he hates thinking of the term _fuck-buddies_ in relation to Tess, she seems to be better at negotiating that dynamic than anyone else he’s ever known.

He can feel her eyes on him, waiting for an answer. “No, there isn’t,” he says at last, short and clipped.

“Are you sure?”

Before he opens his mouth, Scott knows he’s going to hear the sarcastic edge in his voice, the one he usually fights so hard to keep out. “Do I know anyone who would be fine with recreationally fucking me so I can keep myself together at work, and I kick her out before ten every night and never take her on a date? No, I really don’t. Do you?”

Tessa is silent for a couple of beats too long, enough that he realizes she’s actually _thinking_ about it, running through a mental list of girls she knows in Montreal, before she sighs and says, “No, I don’t either.”

He winces and turns to throw another hard jab at the bag. “Fuck, Tess, that wasn’t a real question.”

“Yes it was,” she says, unrepentant. “And I’d set you up if I could, but I can’t think of anyone who would be interested in that kind of arrangement right now. Not anyone mentally stable, at least.”

“Good,” he snaps. “I don’t want you pimping out one of your friends to me, that would be too weird.”

“I know, but we can’t care about weird if it means you can function again.”

Shit. He should’ve been more like her in the past. Maybe this week he would have been ready with a couple of women on speed-dial who wouldn’t mind if he rang them up asking for very specifically termed no-strings sex.

She’s already moving on. From the corner of his eye, he can see her ticking off the next option on her fingers. “There’s nothing medical you can take. Anything like that would affect your testosterone levels and god knows what else.”

He nods without speaking. Twenty minutes of googling had made it clear that medical science spent very little time working on methods to _suppress_ arousal, and the few available drugs would mess up his body chemistry to an unknown level that he could never risk during competition training.

(Google had also confronted him with a horrifying level of detail on chastity bondage gear, which he wouldn’t describe to Tessa with a gun pointed at his head. That route wasn’t feasible even if the pictures hadn’t made his balls want to retract inside his body; equipment like that would cause immediate physical damage during any normal training day.)

Tessa ticks off another finger. “We could hire you a high-end professional. It would be risky because there’s no way to guarantee discretion, and it would be very expensive, but we could do it.”

He sighs and blots his forehead against his upper arm. He’s definitely sweating more than a few minutes of boxing should warrant, standing here and listening to his partner talk about buying prostitutes for him. “Well, you just listed two really good reasons why we can’t.”

Tessa nods. “Alright.”

It feels like the longest silence in the history of their partnership before she continues.

“There’s one option left,” she says quietly.

It doesn’t matter that Scott suspected this was coming. His chest still clenches up in panic and he wants to run straight out of the building, or kill himself, or find some magical way that the other options wouldn’t lead to catastrophe after all, because he can’t believe he’s forced Tessa into a place where she would suggest it.

“ _No_ ,” he says, right away. “That isn’t an—”

Tessa never interrupts him but she doesn’t hesitate to do it now. “Scott,” she says, sharp and clear. “We have a development meeting next Friday.”

He slumps forward against the heavy bag, all at once like his wires have been cut, his arms looped around it.

“I know we do,” he mutters, his face half-buried in the leather.

They can’t go to the meeting and lie about the state of their progress. Even if they could, they can’t ask Marie-France and Patch to do the same.

On Friday he and Tessa are going to be sitting in a conference room with Dominick and their entire support team and they will have to explain what has gone wrong and why their performance has turned to shit, and he wants to disappear into another _dimension_ just thinking about that level of humiliation.

Humiliation aside, there are the very real consequences. B2ten isn’t paying for a raft of services out of kindness. They’re doing it for medals, and if it becomes abruptly obvious that Virtue/Moir have turned into unworkable prospects, that support isn’t going to last. They’ll redirect their funds to people who have a shot at the podium in Korea.

Their podium chances will take a massive dive without the extra support.

“We don’t have any more time,” Tessa says, very softly.

He knows this. Every training day is irreplaceable, every day is like gold dripping slowly away, and he’s wasted four of them and they can’t afford to lose a single additional one. The ACI is scarily close.

“I can’t ask you to do that, Tess,” he says, hoarse, his face still pressed against the bag.

He hears the rustle as she rolls to her feet, and the quiet sounds of her steps, and then she’s at his elbow and gently pulling him around to face her.

She looks as calm as he’s ever seen her, no fidgeting, no restless movements in her shoulders, looking straight into his eyes without flinching. “You’re not asking. I’m offering. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t mean it.”

He knows there are a hundred things he should be saying to her right now. He should try to talk her out of it, promise that he’ll figure out another crazy way, swear that he’ll be fine on Monday and she’ll never have to think about this again—or if he can’t do any of that, at a bare minimum he should be asking if she understands that this could screw up their partnership forever.

Except Tessa has already thought about everything. He can see it in the utter composure of her face. She took him through this uncomfortable conversation so fast and efficient that he knows she’s been analyzing every possible angle and outcome for days, that she knew the logical result and its possible consequences. He’ll only be wasting time if he makes her argue about it.

Scott swallows hard and drops his eyes, and nods. “Okay,” he says, barely audible.


	3. Chapter 3

Their prepared food delivery is a wonderful thing. No shopping, meal planning, or prep time required: just go home after a long training day and heat up the next meal in the cycle, saving hours of valuable time.

Tonight it’s probably saving him in another way. Scott is so tense and distracted that if he’d tried to do any real cooking, he might have set his apartment on fire and burned down the whole building.

Or possibly it isn’t saving him: it’s doing the opposite. Being carted off to A&E with smoke inhalation would be a very valid excuse for not going through with this. 

He’s eating something with chicken and vegetables that doesn’t taste like much. Normally he gets so hungry at the end of the day that it’s a struggle to eat slowly, but tonight the food has zero appeal. He’s chewing and swallowing mechanically, working his way through the required calories, eating because he has to do it. Just another training task like stretching, or targeted weightlifting, or mental focus exercises. Or having sex with his partner in less than an hour.

Scott forces down the last two bites and gets up to dump his plate into the sink.

After showering he’d cranked up TSN in an attempt to drown out his thoughts, but for the first time in weeks he doesn’t give a shit about Auston Matthews and can’t concentrate on any of the post-draft chatter. He tries to stretch out on the couch and pay attention, but it isn’t long before he’s up and pacing the apartment again.

This is starting to feel like the worst decision of his life. He keeps glancing at his car keys on the counter. There’s still time to run.

He veers into the kitchen and stares down at the sink. Four crusty plates are stacked up because he’s been terrible about loading the dishwasher, so he turns on the water and starts scrubbing. TSN is blaring an interview with Babsy, something about team dynamics and playing outside the comfort zone. It sounds creepily relevant. Maybe he could call up Mike and get some motivational advice about tonight, like a lunatic who hasn’t experienced nearly enough humiliation for one week.

There’s some sauce dried to the consistency of concrete on the oldest plate, and he scrubs at it stubbornly.

He could head across the border. Plattsburgh is only about ninety minutes away and it’s small, but big enough for a bar scene. He could try one of those hookup apps. He’s way less likely to be recognized in the States, and he could get a hotel room and do what he needs to do, and make it back north in time for training on—

“Scott?”

He flinches so hard that the plate shoots out of his hands, ricocheting against the basin and shattering gunshot-loud into pieces.

Tessa is standing in the kitchen doorway when he spins around, her eyes wide with alarm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you! The TV was turned up and—”

“God, Tess, you couldn’t ring the bell?” His heart is hammering in his chest, half from surprise and half because, _dammit_. She’s early. No more time to run.

“Your door was standing wide open.” She’s looking at him in the careful, appraising way that he sees more often at the rink, usually when he gets too upset about something and she’s worried about how to level him out.

“It was?” he says blankly. “Oh, I didn’t—I thought I closed it.”

He doesn’t remember doing that, specifically, but who remembers something as basic and automatic as shutting the door when you come home? Fuck, he’s a mess. He must have walked in and gone straight for the shower.

“Did you cut yourself?”

Tessa is stepping closer, frowning, and he turns quickly back to the sink. “No, I’m fine. Just smashed the hell out of the plate.”

She comes up beside him and peers at the jumble of broken pieces. “You really did. I’m sorry.”

Scott shakes his head, looking down. “Not your fault.” He rinses the soap off his fingers and rotates them to show her that they’re intact.

She’s standing so close. He can’t bring himself to meet her eyes when she glances up, so he reaches for an empty bowl and starts picking broken porcelain out of the sink. Most of the pieces are big but there’s a handful of smaller shards and crumbs, and he gathers each one, carefully.

Tessa watches his hands and doesn’t say anything until he’s almost done. “I gave you too much time to freak yourself out, didn’t I?” she asks, low and rueful.

He should laugh to break the tension, but he can’t. “Yeah,” he admits. Anything else would be a lie and she’d know it.

He picks up the last small piece and drops it into the bowl. And then he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, or his body, or the fact that his life has gone completely sideways in less than five days, so he just stares down at the sink, gripping the edge of the counter.

 _Way to force her to make the next move, jackass,_ he thinks at himself viciously, but it’s like he’s in vaporlock or something, the way he can’t look at her.

It feels incredibly strange when she reaches for him. He wants to pull back, wants to delay the beginning of… _this_ for as long as he can, but pulling away from Tessa is such a fundamentally unnatural thing that he can’t do it. He’s freaked out, nerves cranked near breaking point, halfway to a full-on panic attack, but touching her is his default mode. Eighteen goddamn years of it, he can’t pull away.

Her hands settle over the backs of his, so light at first that she’s barely touching him, fingertips resting over his knuckles.

Scott isn’t sure exactly how long they stand there. TSN is yammering away in the background and his hands are still damp from the water. Tessa’s are warm against his skin, her hip leaning against the counter beside him.

“I’m not trying to tell you how to feel,” she says, finally. “But you don’t need to freak out. It’ll be okay.”

 _How the hell do you know that?_ he wants to ask, but he wouldn’t be able to say it calmly. He’d wind up snapping it out, probably shoving them into the argument they’d avoided in the gym. And it’s not an answerable question, anyway. She’s just trying to reassure him. Like they’ve both done for years and years, steady calm sentences about things that neither of them really know at all, encouraging each other so many times, in prep rooms and beside the boards and in the middle of the ice, middle of a skate: _it’s okay, we’re ready, we got this._

Instead he swallows past the dryness in his throat and says, “Please tell me you’re freaking a little too, T. This isn’t how I imagined our weekend going.”

Tessa is silent for only a second before shifting her weight, just barely, but enough that she’s leaning closer. “Really? Because I’ve been imagining it since Wednesday.”

It hits him like a rock to the side of the head: briefly paralyzing, before he jerks around to stare at her. “What?” he says, strangled.

His flinch brought them even closer together. She’s right there, her chin raised, unblinking. “Don’t look at me like that. You were getting hard every time you touched me. I wasn’t supposed to think about having sex with you?”

The reminder of the past week sends dull color flooding into his face, even as he keeps staring in shock. She’s actually _saying_ these things, out loud. “I’m sorry,” he manages. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

The corner of her mouth twitches. “Well, I did anyway.” 

They’ve been trained to look at each other with various forms of amplified desire for over a decade. Scott doesn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified that apparently he knows what the real thing looks like now, for Tessa. Her gaze keeps flicking from his eyes to his mouth, so focused, her teeth gnawing lightly at her bottom lip.

 _Apparently_ the real thing.

The thought is like a shock of cold water to his brain. He winces, and tries to lean away. “Tess, you don’t—you don’t have to lie to me, if that’s what you’re doing. You don’t have to pretend like you want this to make it easier on me.”

Her hands tighten around his. “Hey,” she says, and her expression turns serious as she tugs him around to face her directly. “I’m not lying, I’m not pretending. I wouldn’t lie to you about this. Tell me you know that.”

“Okay?” he says.

He didn’t intend it to come out as an uplifted question, but god, how is he supposed to have any other reaction to Tessa abruptly saying that she’s thought about having sex with him?

They’ve never talked about it. More than once he detected some professionally well-hidden frustration behind the placid faces of their various mental coaches and counsellors, because they are experts at avoiding the subject in therapy. That line developed so long ago that he can’t remember precisely how: they’ll talk about deeply personal emotions and resentments and jealousies, but not about physical attraction, ever. It’s the one boundary they’ve kept constant, their one attempt at maintaining some kind of line between personal and professional with their lives and bodies so relentlessly intertwined for skating.

Tessa looks both fierce and concerned, her eyes searching his face, squeezing his hands tight. “Scott, I’m _not_ pretending.”

She sounds almost angry that he would suspect that, and he squeezes back reflexively. “Okay. I get it, T. I believe you.”

 _This is ridiculous, you’re making her convince you that she wants to fuck you._ He feels close to launching into hysterics or something because—it’s crazy, it’s the weirdest situation he could possibly imagine for them, and she’s still looking at him like she’s worried that he doesn’t believe her. Which: he doesn’t, not completely. She might think she’s telling the truth but they’d never be standing here talking about this if his own lack of control hadn’t forced it.

“I’ve wanted to sleep with you since I was fifteen,” she says, all in a rush. “I never _stopped_ thinking about it. I pushed it away because we needed to, but I always thought about it. I always wanted you. This isn’t new.”

Scott knows he’s gaping at her, his mouth hanging open senselessly, but he can’t help it. She has twin spots of color rising in her cheeks and her eyes are darting off to the side now, and this look, he recognizes. This is Tessa telling him something true that she wishes she didn’t have to admit out loud, but she’s doing it anyway, for him.

The panicked knot in his chest loosens by degrees, because _holy shit_ , she isn’t lying.

“Oh,” he says. His face feels a little numb. “That’s… good. Thanks.”

Tessa stares at him for a beat, her eyebrows going up, and he stares back, a long frozen instant before they both break at the same time, all the tension dissolving straight into uncontrollable laughter. “ _That’s good, thanks?_ ” she echoes between giggles. “Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with? Smooth, Scott, very smooth.”

“Shut _up_ ,” he gasps. “Don’t pick on me, I wasn’t ready to hear that!”

They laugh until they’re leaning together for support, and as they start to wind down, she looks him dead in the eye and repeats, “Thanks!” and they’re off again, slapping at each other’s shoulders, giggling and snorting until they can hardly breathe.

Scott feels about a thousand pounds lighter when they finally taper off for good, Tessa hiccupping and wiping the corners of her eyes, smiling up at him. “That’s better,” she says with satisfaction. “I don’t think we’ve laughed since Tuesday. It felt really wrong.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “It was a fucking nightmare, this whole week.”

He pulls her into a hug without giving himself time to reconsider, because he missed this just as much as laughing together. _Wrong_ was too mild a word. It had felt like a piece taken out of him, losing their casual affection and ease, having to keep his distance for so many days.

She’s still smiling when they separate. “Alright,” she says on an exhale, and he feels a twinge of anxiety coming back because she’s going slightly businesslike on him again. Her forehead wrinkles, and she clasps his hands as she gives him another searching look. “Hey. Don’t be weird on me, now. We’re past that.”

“Right,” he says, and then, stronger: “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“So I am,” Tessa says. Her fingers are stroking over the thin skin on the inside of his wrists, light and tingling. “We can take care of each other, right?”

He wants to say yes, because he’s been half-hard since she first crossed the kitchen to stand beside him. His body hadn’t cared that he might’ve been headed into something close to nonconsensual sex with his partner; his body seemingly didn’t give a damn about morals and would’ve been fine with it. His mind is better now, after everything she said, so he doesn’t feel required to flay himself apart with guilt that he’s forcing her into this, but—still. It’s like some bizarre dream that he’s been shoved into unprepared, and his imagination is rearing up with every way it could go bad.

“Don’t let me—if you change your mind, or if I do something you don’t like, anything, stop me.” Scott’s mouth feels clumsy around the words, like he’s a terrified virgin with no clue how to communicate. “Just stop me, and leave, you don’t have to explain, it doesn’t matter, because I can’t, I can’t handle it if you do something you don’t want, Tess. Not for—please, just stop me.”

Tessa listens intently, her eyes never leaving his as he stumbles through it. “I will,” she says simply, and he feels a giant wave of relief that she isn’t trying to dismiss what he’s saying, or the fact that he needed to say it.

Her fingertips are still tracing slow patterns on his wrists.

For days he’s tried not to look at her too long, and now he can. She looks perfect, the end-of-day Tessa look that’s maybe his favorite because most people never get to see her like this, her hair loose around her shoulders, fresh-scrubbed from the shower in shorts and a tank top, and her beautiful eyes watching him, waiting. His entire body feels like it’s thrumming, coiled tight.

He leans in and kisses her forehead, palms settling tentatively on her waist. He hasn’t been this nervous about putting his hands on Tessa’s body since—he can’t even remember. A long time ago, when they were moving up to advanced lifts and he hadn’t gotten used to the intimacy of it, touching her upper thighs, her ass, lifting her body to his shoulders and holding her close.

It’s like moving through a trance as he brushes his mouth against her temple, then her cheek. Tessa shifts in his arms, tipping her head slightly as he kisses her neck, shivering as he grazes under her ear. Her hands are pressed against his chest and he wonders if this feels as surreal to her, how technically he isn’t doing anything yet that they haven’t performed in front of thousands—in front of _cameras_ , for christ’s sake—but it’s so different, with intent being everything.

When he pulls back to check in, and maybe to ask her that, she’s already watching him.

“You’re allowed to do more, you know,” she says, and oh hell, she’s _grinning_ now, just a little, that tiny smirk she gets when she’s daring him, whenever they’re trying something new and half-insane on the ice.

Scott knows he’s reflecting it back at her automatically, because of course she’d be competitive, even about this. “Oh, fine,” he says, rolling his eyes theatrically to make her grin wider.

Then he lowers his head to kiss her for real, the first time, and she meets him halfway.

Their lips have touched so many times. That one peck when they were little kids, sure, but he barely remembers anything about that beyond being so jittery that he almost backed out. All the others have been staged brushes, or accidentally firmer in practice or performance: momentum that didn’t stop quite short enough, centripetal force pulling them together. Always chaste, never deliberate, and never something that mattered enough that they couldn’t shrug it off with a grin or a laugh.

It’s never been Tessa kissing him with _purpose_ , her hands gliding along his jaw and up into his hair. He’s never felt her tongue slipping inside his mouth.

Scott manages to keep it slow for about three and a half seconds. He wants slow, he wants to register every detail, soft and exploring and learning the way their lips fit together, but that disappears in a flash when she makes a low, hungry noise into his mouth and presses closer, and immediately he’s backing her up against the counter.

He moves a lot faster than he intended. The body pressure feels so good that it takes him another second to realize what he’s actually doing: pinning her against a flat surface with his erection pushed hard against her stomach, and jesus christ, there’s making out and then there’s _shoving your partner against a granite countertop with your dick_ and he can’t believe that he—something in his brain is yelling for him to quit it right now, back off, it’s too much too fast—but he doesn’t have any time to pull away. He barely has time to freeze in mortification because Tessa moans against his lips, a startled punched-out noise like she didn’t mean to do it, and then she’s wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him in tighter, and he’s totally lost.

It’s like an engine revving from idle to full speed with no warning, kissing so furiously that it’s more like they’re trying to suffocate each other. He knows he should try to slow them down, he _knows_ it, he’s in serious danger of rubbing off against her even through multiple layers of clothes, but her hands are almost clawing at his neck and shoulders and she’s biting at his tongue and he doesn’t know if he’s ever been this hard.

He forces himself to rock back slightly, making enough space to move his hands to her thighs. It’s quick but Tessa still responds instantly, her own hands bracing on his shoulders, springing up on her toes as he lifts her to the counter.

They don’t even stop kissing while he does it. 

_Hey, teamwork,_ Scott thinks distantly, and he’d crack up laughing again if he wasn’t so fucking desperate. Thousands of hours practicing lifts and learning to read the slightest twitch in each other’s bodies and he’s just used that to position her so he can wrap both hands around her ass and haul her into him, _hard_ , pressing between her legs and feeling the way she jerks against him, swallowing the moan that vibrates against his mouth.

He’s felt fourteen again all week in the worst way, uncontrolled hormones and embarrassment and no idea what to do about his body. This is fourteen in the best possible headbusting way, every inch of his skin shivering and wide-awake like he hasn’t done any of this before, with anyone.

By the time they break apart Tessa is panting, flushed down to her chest. “We need to move somewhere that isn’t your kitchen, please,” she murmurs, her lips still glancing against his jaw, shifting like she wants to climb down from the counter. It isn’t very effective, because it only presses them more firmly together.

Her voice has a husky note that he’s never heard before and _fuck_ , he wants to hear more of it.

Scott applies his mouth to her neck again, nipping under her ear, and relishes it when she arches into him, her feet kicking at the back of his thighs. “Yeah, okay,” he says, muffled against her skin, but he’s distracted when her hands drop to slide under his shirt. She drags slow lines with her nails along the dip of his lower back and he groans, helplessly, surging forward to grind against her. He’s not going to last if she keeps doing that. Another minute or two and he really might round out the week’s awkward teenage theme by coming in his pants.

It’s the sound of the TSN broadcast penetrating his brain that shakes him out of it. He’ll be damned if the Montreal Canadiens season outlook is the soundtrack for _this_ particular experience, thank you very much.

He lifts his head to kiss her again, softer, and so he can see her eyes when he asks, “Bedroom alright?” It doesn’t matter how hard they’ve been going at each other; he isn’t taking a single thing as guaranteed.

“ _Yes_ ,” she says emphatically, and surprises a laugh out of him when she levers forward and wraps her legs high around his waist.

Scott can’t help suddenly remembering one of their sillier discussions, a few months before Sochi. Recovery rooms have always been where they talk about the most random things to distract themselves from the discomfort or boredom of various treatments, and once they tried to estimate whether he had actually carried her the length of Canada on the ice. They’d gotten absorbed in trying to gauge the distance of various lifts, estimating practice time and counting up competitions, Tessa punching numbers into the calculator on her phone. The end result was definitely unscientific as hell, placing them about halfway across the country, but it had been hilarious fun to run back through each of their programs and try to remember how far the lifts had travelled. And privately he’d liked to think about how there was an actual true distance, unknowable but real, marking how long he had spent with his partner raised up in his arms, a line moving steadily every year.

This lift, though: every step is going to be burned into his brain forever. Carrying her out of the kitchen and pausing to hammer impatiently at the TV remote with Tessa laughing in his ear, her body wrapped tight around him, her mouth pressing against his neck warm and wet and teasing, and the precisely measurable distance to his bedroom that he can’t cross nearly fast enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No worries, I didn't lose inspiration or motivation for writing this, I just had no time for anything but work for almost a month. Also the plot (if RPF nonsense written almost purely as an excuse to get them naked can be called a "plot") expanded from three parts to at least five after I finished the second one and I needed enough time to get this chapter right. But thank you so much for your lovely comments! They were so encouraging and I am catching up on replies tomorrow. Figured you'd rather have a new chapter up first, though. (And I could apologize for where it left off but I won't because I am evil and have no shame.)
> 
> I'm not on Twitter or Tumblr so if you want to holler at me, this is the place.


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